Free Press Staff Writer

The provision was added to a House health-insurance bill that the committee is expected to finish and vote to recommend to the full Senate today.

Sen. Virginia Lyons, D-Chittenden, proposed the tobacco tax increase but was open to any level of increase greater than 80 cents, which advocates said would be the minimum amount necessary to affect buying habits of smokers and of those thinking about starting to smoke.

Lyons pushed for a $1.25 increase.

Finance Chairman Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, countered with 80 cents, and his option won on a 5-2 vote.

Then the entire committee agreed, 7-0, to support adding the 80-cent increase to the health-insurance bill.

The House supported a 50 cent increase in the cigarette tax, but in a different bill.

Still, if there is support on record in each chamber — once the full Senate considers the health-insurance bill with the appended cigarette tax — it would make it easier to reach a compromise.

Jim Harrison, president of the Vermont Grocers’ Association, sat through the committee’s deliberations and vote. He said later he hoped a majority of lawmakers would support retailers and reject this proposed increase.

He noted the difference between New Hampshire’s cigarette tax rate of $1.68 per pack, compared with the new level that Vermont’s tax would hit: $3.42. The difference would drive business across the border, he argued.

Antismoking advocates, by contrast, welcomed the victory even though they had wanted a bigger increase.

“Eighty cents is good,” Kelly Stoddard, the American Cancer Society’s director of government relations and advocacy in Vermont, said after the vote. “The tax is about saving lives.”